Pascack Valley junior Lindsey Mattesich always enjoyed watching YouTube videos when she was younger. In fifth grade, she wanted to create a channel, but was “too nervous” to start. Now, she has over 1,000 subscribers.

“I started filming on my phone and I barely knew how to edit,” Mattesich said. “Currently, I don’t know everything, but I get more how it works and I have a camera. I think that it’s a cool thing for people to think about or even watch because everything is on [YouTube]. It ranges so much.”

Mattesich created her YouTube channel on Feb. 4, 2018, and posted her first video in May. As of now, her favorite YouTubers are James Charles, Tana Mongeau, and Cody Ko.

“My parents kind of told me to do it and I also was nervous to do it,” Mattesich said. “Finally, I was just like, ‘Who cares, I’m going to do it.’”

Mattesich uploads vlogs and sitting and talking videos in her bedroom to her channel once a week. She said that if she is not able to post during a week, she publishes two videos the following week.

“I like entertaining people and making people laugh,” Mattesich said. “[My channel] is mainly for comedic purposes — being funny is the goal [YouTube] is not like Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat where they all copy each other. I think that everyone has the opportunity to do it no matter how much money or how many followers you have.”

Mattesich started to gain publicity after publishing a video on Jan. 15 titled “ETHMA CONFIRMED!!!!! i have proof,” which has reached over 40,000 views and almost 2,000 likes. She said she figured that the video would receive more views than usual, but “did not expect it to do that well.”

“I’m proud of how many subscribers she has gotten and how many views she has on the Ethma video,” PV junior and Mattesich’s friend Lily Glastein said. “I’m proud of everything she does.”

The video was posted after Youtuber Ethan Dolan tweeted about Emma Chamberlain, a fellow Youtuber, after she received a hate comment about her videos. The two YouTubers are believed to be in a relationship, although it has not been officially confirmed. Ethma is Dolan and Chamberlain’s relationship name or “ship name” — a common trend on social media for alleged and verified couples. Mattesich said that the tweet made the “whole Internet blow up.”

“There was so much drama with this, and my first instinct is to always make a joke about it, which is what I did,” Mattesich said. “Some people didn’t know it was a joke and I got a lot of push-back on it. I think about it in a business-type standpoint. I strategically posted it, not hoping to get as many views as it did, but to get my name out there.”

Mattesich said that there was a period where the video was increasing 1,000 to 2,000 views a day. She believes that it was because the video was in the recommendations category on YouTube.

“I hope that she becomes famous one day because that’s really cool. I think that once a video gets more views, it’s recommended to more people,”Glastein said. “It’s like a snowball effect.”

Mattesich said that balancing YouTube and school can get “tricky at times” since uploading a video requires filming and editing. If she has school, it takes two to three days to edit a video.

“If I’m in a rush, I will film and edit a video in a night, but if I have time, it usually takes 5 days to go up on my channel,” Mattesich said. “There are some times when I put YouTube before school, which isn’t a good thing, but that’s very rare. It takes around a week with my schedule of school and being out all day.”

In college, Mattesich is planning to study interior design, but she is keeping her options open.

“If the opportunity were to come to me, I would love to do [YouTube],” Mattesich said. “If it didn’t happen, I’m obviously not going to cry about it. That’s my dream, but it’s not something you can go to college for.”